Stem Cell Fraud — The Personal Toll

The boy who became known as “Donor 2″ was propped up in a wheelchair when a team of esteemed scientists strolled into his hospital room nearly three years ago. The boy, 9-year-old Kim Hyeoni, had been hit by a car while crossing the street the previous year. Once a chubby-cheeked child who loved baseball and practical jokes, he now was paralyzed from the neck down. “Sir, will I be able to stand up and walk again?” he asked the leader of the team, a South Korean veterinarian named Hwang Woo Suk, according to an account by his father. “I will make you walk. I promise,” replied Hwang, who would soon afterward announce a breakthrough in the cloning of human stem cells. With that meeting in April 2003, Hyeoni in effect became a poster boy in the quest to use cloned stem cells for experimental treatments of spinal-cord injuries. His father, a Methodist minister, defied the beliefs of many of his fellow church members and allowed Hwang to cut skin samples from his son’s abdomen for the research. Hyeoni’s mother, a nurse, volunteered for the invasive procedure of having her eggs extracted to donate to Hwang’s laboratory. Now the family is faced with the sinking realization that “it was all a big lie,” said Kim Je Eon, the boy’s 43-year-old father.